Marc Palmer

I’m just logging these FAILURES OF THE CO-OPERATIVE BUSINESS BANKING now to up the pressure and publicity… and get more comments from other users. There are already many comments on a prior post about the constant errors and NO_RESOURCE errors from Co-op biz web banking.

How come we can’t claim compensation for this? Because we can call up and wait 20min to be served?

Anyway today:

1. Try to log in, can’t. Says NO_RESOURCES error
2. Try to log in again. Same
3. Try to log in again. Same
4. Try to log in. Succeed. Forwards me to “You MUST change you password” screen
5. Annoyed, enter old and new passwords and submit. Says NO_RESOURCES error
6. Have to log in again. Don’t know which password to use now. Try more than 5 times. Sometimes wrong credentials (I don’t know which is right now) and sometimes NO_RESOURCES
7. Finally get in, and taken to “You MUST change you password” screen again
8. Change password OK, and log in. Amen

[UPDATE: An hour later I try to log in to pay my accountant. Log in fine. Get to payment screen, go through the mindachingly awful UI to select a date range - did I mention they changed the default to showing all reports for "today" only to lessen system load? - Try to get list of previous payments... NO_RESOURCES. Returns me to login screen. Log in again, shows me I am "already logged in". Dashboard comes up, half page fails to load "Unable to find service BroadcastMessaging". It goes on....]

I know, it’s too much to ask. I’d like to view the transactions on my business current account since December 2008 please. Oooops E_MT_ERROR and:

Error: org.omg.CORBA.NO_RESOURCES: vmcid: 0×0 minor code: 0 completed: No (8516)

Again. At best Co-op business banking is painfully slow. Very often it just doesn’t work at all.

Today, I am finally going to see if I can talk to a manager on their internet team and see what plans they have to remedy this.

Thanks to all the Co-op customers who have commented on my various posts about them. Keep the comments coming.

The uselessness of Co-op Bank’s online business banking is a long running saga on my blog.

The latest twist, which I noticed some weeks ago, is as follows. Previously lots of problems with CORBA_NO_RESOURCES errors coming back to you when you try to do stuff.

It doesn’t take an IT consultant to guess this means their servers are overloaded.

Which is why I am a little cynical when I see that they have changed all the payment reporting screens to default to show only payments from TODAY by default. Where you used to see a history of recent payments immediately, you always have to select a date range and do a report now.

Why cynical? Well you could argue that this was a cheap way to further inconvenience customers reduce load on the database systems.

Dear Co-op bank. I’m getting more and more people contacting me via blog comments saying how fed up they are. You are going to lose a lot of business if you don’t sort this out.

Check out today’s error message from Co-op online business banking. It is amazing, it always seems to be broken when I need it. Either I am unlucky or it is broken a hell of a lot of the time:

Support Information
Error Number:    8516
Severity:    E_MT_ERROR
Message:    org.omg.CORBA.NO_RESOURCES: vmcid: 0×0 minor code: 0 completed: No

A delightful message to show your user. Sounds very much like the system is overrun. Which means either an inability to manage load/scale your system properly, or the system is falling over.

CORBA. Yes CORBA. Really. In 2008.

Co-op bank, I am sick of this, and sick of writing to you about this crap that you forced on us customers. Nothing changes. No announcements. No road map. No improvement.

I’m getting very close to registering co-op-online-business-banking-sucks.com and setting up a forum for people to air their complaints…

It looks like the Co-operative Bank have upgraded their total disaster of a rework of their previously perfectly reliable business online banking service.

I can tell this because the UI has changed slightly, and more importantly pretty much any time I try to request a page i.e. do anything with the site I get this glorious error message:

That or the variant: "org.omg.CORBA.NO_RESOURCES: vmcid: 0×0 minor code: 0 completed: No"

First, we try not to laugh that they are still using CORBA. Then we laugh at the genius of the package name "org.omg" as in OH MY GOD. Then we cry that after what must be 3 years or so now, Co-Op bank has still utterly failed to turn this into an appealing and reliable online banking product, when they do so well on the personal banking site and use COMPLETELY DIFFERENT code it seems on the business side. Anyone heard of D.R.Y. at Co-Op Bank?

Online banking is about the least funny place to have I.T. clowns working instead of actual experts. Co-Op have been suckered by their IT managers, internal or external, and seem to remain blinded by them. Even the call centre staff know how bad this is, and its been going on for years.